Transcript: Anti-Corruption Politics Are the Way to Crush Trumpism

Oh, popularism. Can it fit into that one? That’s the hard-to-define thing, but can it—but it is popular, I guess.

Bonica: Well, I mean, it is—popularism is about looking at what voters are telling us and what they want. They want anti-corruption more than anything else, according to polls. So it would … you would have to argue pretty hard against what voters want in polls to say that popularism wouldn’t fit into that, as well.

Bacon: Alright. So again, you’ve given a theory that’s hard to disagree with right now. So what should the next steps be for the Democratic Party and also for those of us who are not Democratic Party leaders and those of us who are just regular citizens. If we could believe in this idea, how do we propagate this further?

Bonica: So, let me just step back a bit. So the leadership has a different challenge than the population. The population seems to, and the public, and voters and people who are engaged in progressive and democratic politics all seem to be pretty aligned that this regime is corrupt.

Bacon: Yeah.

Bonica: Where the challenge is, is how do we coordinate that to turn it into an effective electoral opposition? That’s the challenge for 2026. Beyond that, the other thing about anti-corruption politics is it doesn’t stop at the ballot box—that even if we face a, hopefully not, a type of election that is unwinnable for Democrats, which authoritarians often try to push towards; that is often their goal: to make sure that elections are still held but they’re not actually competitive in a way that’s winnable by the opposition party. If we find ourselves in that situation, anti-corruption becomes a mass movement. It’s usually a key component of mass protests. Some of the most famous examples would be the Philippines and the People Powered Revolution.

But right now we see in Serbia, for example, a large mass anti-corruption protest movement. And so I would say for the party, the challenge is they need to coordinate, they need to create a message, they need to actually coalesce that energy in something that’s going to be electorally advantageous—which they can do, but they just need to make sure that they do it in a way that isn’t undermined by their own people’s own sense of their corruption.

Right? So they need to really clean house to do that. For voters, they just need to know that that’s an avenue. If you go to the No Kings protest, there’s lots of people with signs that hit on issues of anti-corruption. It’s very much within that movement already.

Bacon: One thing I want to emphasize here is you’ve mentioned a lot of international comparisons.

You wrote a piece earlier in the year that I thought was really great. Adam has a Substack called On Democracy and Data, and you went through a bunch of countries where some head of state had committed some kind of illegal act, and then the country had not only thrown that person out of power but also banned them from being in power again. You get this long list of—it’s not just Brazil—you got a long list of examples.

And I think it went to this interesting point, which is, we in the U.S. often treat … We are democracy and we are special, and no other country’s ever tried democracy. And there was a whole rhetoric from—not the right, from the left—on We can’t punish Trump, we can’t ban him.

That would be taking on one party. So talk about—the example is obvious—so talk about why it’s important for people in the U.S. to look at democracy in other nations and think about what we can learn from things abroad.

Bonica: I mean, the simple answer is what we’re facing in the U.S. may feel exceptional to us, but to my colleagues who study comparative politics, they look at what’s happening in the U.S., and they’re like, yep, that’s—like, they’re checking off boxes. They’ve seen this before. Other countries have been through this. And we have lots of examples of countries that have successfully navigated this and pulled off what’s called an autocratic U-turn, where things had trended in a really negative, antidemocratic way but then reversed.

And so one of the reasons is because we have lots of other countries that have done the hard work to face off against authoritarian politics and have succeeded. And so we really should not discount that. 

The other thing is that the U.S. has been quite exceptional relative to pretty much any other democracy in how we’ve treated the powerful who have behaved in ways that were antidemocratic. As you mentioned, I put together that list—it was 34 different prime ministers and presidents of countries—and this was only in the last 20 years. Like, there would be a much longer list. And so I just compiled a list of all these examples of national-level leaders who had been convicted of a crime and what was the consequence.

And in every single example, except for the U.S., which was the sole exception, the offending leader was either banned from running for office or imprisoned. The U.S. was the only place where that didn’t happen. And, to be honest, if you look at the crimes that were committed by other leaders, Trump had done every single one of them, and for the most part in a much more intense fashion.

And so this whole hemming and hawing we saw—it goes back to this notion of; there is this elite protection norm within American politics, this idea that it was going to be too polarizing to go after a leader for the criminal acts and antidemocratic acts that Trump had committed out in the open.

And the idea that, Oh, it’s going to pull the party apart—well, every single country where you see that happen, the leader who’s accused always says it’s a political attack. But the response is what matters. Like, you have to hold the powerful accountable.

And that’s maybe the key example showing, wow, the U.S. really should have looked at what other countries were doing when we were navigating that moment. The right thing to do was to move swiftly, to bring, like … so, early on in the Biden administration, had that been a priority—and it should have been a priority—we would’ve just been one of 35 countries who had done that, not the one country who didn’t.

Bacon: Let me finish on two subjects. The first is you and Jacob Grumbach, great political scientist at Berkeley, wrote a piece that got published in The New Republic a couple days ago arguing that Gen Z is actually very progressive, or the most progressive generation of the generations we have, on racial issues.

And this idea that there’s a bunch of Joe Rogans is inaccurate. Let me ask this. First of all, we saw this drop in youth—in the youth vote for Democrats from 2020 to 2024 that led to all this … the young white … young Gen Z men, white and non-white, are sort of Joe Rogan devotees.

What did you make of that drop, and what explains that drop to you?

Bonica: A drop? So from what I can see in the data, that drop was largely a function of turnout dynamics. We saw a much bigger drop among, say, registered Democrats and also registered independents that are very likely Democrats who didn’t vote in 2024, that would’ve voted or did vote in 2020. And Republicans saw no commensurate drop in that generation. So often what we interpret as these electoral swings really are just who’s turning out to vote. And you can predict a lot of political election outcomes just based off of these turnout dynamics without having a single person switch parties or switch their vote. And so that’s how I interpret largely there. You know, there is something odd going on among some … something different happening among a subset of young men. And so I think that’s also something that we need to recognize.

But as a group, this notion that Gen Z has just done this U-turn—from going from being the most progressive and most Democratic generation that we had seen to all of a sudden the one that was the most Republican and conservative—that just doesn’t add up.

It also didn’t show up in the actual exit polls of the data. It was just a narrative that emerged. And I think that a more data-driven look at what Gen Z believes and what they want out of politics points in a very different direction.

Bacon: And let me close. You’ve been a part of this big debate about moderation and, there’s a term called war that I don’t remember.

But I think the core thing that I want to ask you about then is, I guess even I have—who’s someone who’s probably left ideologically in a way most people aren’t—always assumed this … [that] there’s a lot to be gained by being the most centrist candidate.

I may disagree with Joe Manchin on policy, but if we ran Joe Manchin everywhere, that would win most of the most seats, and that’d be great. And I think your data is … what you’re arguing is that maybe that was true in 1992, but we’ve had a change. That the benefits of moderation went from pretty big, went from sizable to almost zero? Explain what the argument is here.

Bonica: The core of the argument is actually partisanship has just become so dominant in American politics that it’s near impossible to truly outrun your party.  What that means is that if someone shows up to vote and they’re voting up and down the ballot, if that person’s voting for the presidential Democratic ticket, they’re totally going to vote for everyone downballot Democrat.

That’s how things work these days. That wasn’t true back in the 1980s, right? There was a lot more ideological overlap between parties. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and so you saw a lot more opportunities for someone to outrun their party. 

The crux of the argument is, I have millions and millions of data points—political scientists have been studying this for generations now. And unlike physics, in political science you don’t find laws of the universe that hold forever, right? Like, you have to continually check them to see if they’re still applicable to the political environment. The median voter theorem, which is this notion that if you move to the center you do better in politics, has two important caveats to it. One, people can’t be pure partisans—which now, we’re in a moment where that is true for the most part. And two, turnout has to remain fixed, right? 

So a lot of what, even those theories … you go back and you read the early political science on it. The median voter theorem didn’t even survive the original book that it was developed in—the Downsian theory of voting—because he came to this conclusion: Well, if turnout changes, then the median voter isn’t a fixed position. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing. The whole wave-cycle pattern that we see is this pattern of … if the turnout surges on the Democratic side and doesn’t on the Republican side, you see a wave election, and you see all these swing districts swinging one way or another.

That wouldn’t happen in a world where voters were voting on individual candidates and not on parties. I mean, the bigger issue is this whole debate has ignored the last 30 years of very rigorous political science research on this question, and that, I think, was one of the more frustrating aspects of it because political scientists have found consistently over the last decade or two that this—this effect—was really small.

There is still a small persuasion effect for moderation, right? Like, you can do a little bit better in your district relative to your party, but for a major ideological shift—moving from, say the center of the party to where Joe Manchin is—you can expect to get about half a percentage point in vote share.

So how many districts would that swing? Well, zero. And all the districts that we have that were swing districts in 2024 had moderates running in them anyway. And so this strategy—the problem with it is, as a party strategy, it’s tapped out. There are no gains left to be had.

And those gains that would be had if you had a bunch of progressives, perhaps, running in those districts are just not there—they would be small anyway. So I think that’s what’s frustrating about that debate, that it’s trying to give this party-wide strategy over to this tactic that just—there’s really not much to be gained from it.

Bacon: Let me play this out a little bit. Alright, so, if we wanted to see the Democrats win a stable Senate or a Senate majority, if we want to see the Democrats win Ohio and Iowa, let’s say, it’s likely that they’re going to win that only if they’re fairly close in the presidential. 

Part of what you’re saying is if they lose the presidential by 40 points, they’re not going to have this magic candidate who breaks from the party by 12. And I think you’re also saying that the path to Democrats getting 52 percent nationally is probably not—and also in Ohio—is probably not moderation, Bill Clinton–style, because they’ve been doing that.

It hasn’t worked. It might … in other words, the anti-corruption thing is at least something maybe they haven’t tried already as a way to get to a bigger national majority.

Bonica: Yeah. So, I think my view on this is anti-corruption has huge upsides, electorally, if done right; the types of upsides that could really upend the way we’ve seen this ossified politics take place.

Bacon: It could be a realignment, so to speak.

Bonica: Yeah. And realignment for decisions. The New Deal realignment—there are things that happen when parties have openings and they make the decision to take them. Like, the New Deal realignment in the 1930s was a deliberate response by the Democratic Party and FDR to deal with it in a different way.

It was a—at the time—seen as a risky prospect, but one that paid off enormously. The Southern realignment, the most recent major realignment we’ve seen, was a deliberate set of decisions by Democratic leadership about civil rights and a Republican response to go from the party of Lincoln to the party of Southern racism, in a sense.

This is something that a party needs to decide to do. The realignment isn’t just something you wait for—you wait for the opportunity, and then you take advantage of it. I see anti-corruption as this very open lane for that type of realignment that has the distinctive advantage of you don’t upset anyone in your existing coalitions, other than a few powerful politicians who you don’t need anyway.

Bacon: Adam, this was a great conversation. I’m going to end it there. Thank you for joining us. I urge everybody to look at Adam’s Substack, On Data and Democracy, because he’s got some really great work that is essential to understanding politics there.

He also, with Jacob Grumbach, has a piece on the New Republic website about young voters not being as conservative as claimed. So, Adam, thanks for joining us.

Bonica: Thanks for having me.